Quickies: Postings that are Short and Sweet

Fun and games in Saint Cloud - We watch Reagan watch the binky go 'round and 'round. Sometimes we watch giant tree frogs urinate on the back porch screen.

The swimming hole or a livestock water tank

Bad Day in Duck Town

“I drowned one of the ducks.”

It’s never a good sign when you start out the day by drowning an aquatic bird.

What? I didn’t do it. Sherwood, my husband and boyfriend of thirty plus years, did.

But it’s my fault.

I told him what to do, just not often enough or clearly enough or slowly enough or enough. 

When I noticed that our four new ducklings ($3.99 at Tractor Supply) were starting to walk like Quasimodo, I jumped on the Internet, typed in “ducks lurching about like a character in a French novel”, eavesdropped on several duck blogs, and learned that ducklings being raised in giant rubber buckets occasionally fail to develop proper leg strength. Therapy to develop proper duck muscles included thirty minutes per day of swimming about in water of a sufficient depth.

That’s what I told my husband. Thirty minutes.

NOT – place ducklings in bucket of water and leave, until one drowns, remove remaining ducklings. Confess.

When he confessed what had happened, I said, “You don’t listen.”

He said, “Oh, I listen. I just don’t hear you.”

In truth, Sherwood felt horrible about the accidently drowning. Especially in light of the fact that he’s been working on a state of the art duck pen, complete with antique iron tub and surrounding concrete decking. He’s been working on the duck pen for about a year, because his first duck construction efforts resembled the work of a drunken computer programmer and my husband, a computer programmer, doesn’t drink.

Raising baby ducks has a learning curve like everything else, and duck farming ain’t for sissies. But like all learning curves it’s extremely helpful if hearing and listening become part of the duck therapy experience, before . . .

. . . somebody has to die.

Linda (Duck Out) Zern

 

   

Side Show

Our assignment for Creative Writing: Make a list that eventually tells a story . . . 

E.J., Nicole, Rafe, and Sami Talk

Barry finds an old pair of boxers

Vincent attempts to convince the world he’s legally insane

BABY BORN TWICE

Contestants dive into foam

Matt and Lou crash a wedding

Jessica accidentally calls her husband

WOMAN WITH TWO HUNDRED POUND TUMOR!

Long term solution for hair removal

This 10 minute method ignites and melts fat

A collection of more than 2,000 wigs

GIRL WITH TWO HEADS!

City hall may be haunted

Novelist found dead in her car

Woman lives in log cabin with no electricity

GRANDMOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO HERSELF!

Looks, smell, sounds, feels, tastes and swims like a wounded baitfish

Thirteen has a bad date

A wee sized alien

BOY IMPALED THROUGH HEART—LIVES!

Capitol Hill Hearings: no information available

Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer: no information available

C-Span: no information available

Dirty bombs; China’s economic chaos. Series

SURVIVORS OF AN APOCALYPSE JOIN FORCES AGAINST ZOMBIES

Happy Easter Shoes

Secrets of a Relapsed Shoe Shopper

 Or

 How to Think in Circles

Being a girl beats being a sharp stick in the eye.

I love being a girl. I love dressing up and makeup and hairdos and having long eyelashes. That’s how you know you’re a girl, if you have long eyelashes, but everyone knows that.

Being a girl beats being someone who has to wear ugly shoes. Have you seen boy shoes? Plain. Flat. Cloned. Cow. Flesh. There, now you’ve seen boy shoes.

I love being a girl, because the shoes are “too cha-cha for words.” Except that I’m not supposed to love shoes, because it’s wrong and vain and superficial and materialistic and . . . I only have two feet and . . .what do I need all those shoes for, and if God had wanted me to have 100 pairs of shoes He would have made me a centipede . . . and . . . 

So I went on the NO shoe-shopping wagon for months and months, but no one told me what a good job I was doing NOT buying shoes. In fact, no one mentioned my NOT buying shoes at all. It was highly anti-gratifying and kind of sad when no one sends me anything in the mail except the county, making sure that I know the government is trying to knock down every tree between my house and Macy’s.

So then I overpaid the Macy’s credit card by a bit. What? It happens. Besides, I really don’t eat very much so I must have sent the food money to Macy’s department store, by accident.

But then I realized that no one had patted my head and told me what a good girl I’d been for NOT buying shoes, and since I wasn’t comfortable with Macy’s having all of my food money in the form of a credit, and then there was this amazing spring shoe sale . . .

So I bought four pair of shoes to eat up the credit on my account, but I went over by a couple of bucks, and now I owe Macy’s money for shoes, and that’s how I fell off the NO shoe-shopping wagon and landed on my feet, wearing a dynamite pair of Easter floral pumps.

Linda (Too Cha-Cha for Words) Zern         

Sell It, Smoke It, Flush It

Hey Boy Dudes and Girl Dudes,

            I found pot in my garage yesterday. I should end this communication right here. No, that would be cruelly unusual. Okay, so I found pot in the garage yesterday.

            I was throwing some storage boxes around, pretending to simplify and organize, when one of the box lids came loose. Stuff flew out. Bending, I scooped up a bit of desiccated leaves and seeds wrapped neatly in clear plastic wrap and tied with a blue twist tie.

            “What’s this?” I mumbled to no one in particular. I shook the bag in front of my face.  Seeds jumped.

            “Wow, this sure looks like pot,” I said, also to no one in particular. Our cat, Charlie, meowed.

            I glanced at her with narrowed eyes and asked, “Charlie, are you smoking pot?” She meowed again, and that’s when I got paranoid.

            First, I made a mental note that the pot had flown out of the box belonging to the kid that I’ve always suspected of everything. Then I made phone calls. I called my husband, my best friend, my oldest daughter, and a drug awareness hotline. I also confronted the only kid at home, with the righteous flourish of an 11^th century crusader.

            I said, “Sherwood, what’s the worst thing parents can find in their own home?”

            My husband said, “A used condom.”

            “No. Good answer, but wrong,” I corrected him. “The answer is pot. What should I do with it?”

            He said, “Sell it.”

            I hung up the phone and tried my best friend Mindy. I said, “I found pot.”

            Mindy said, “Really, where?”

            I said, “On top of some Mother’s Day cards and Boy Scout awards.”

            She said, “How much is there?”

            I said, “A nickel bag.” I actually used the words nickel bag. I don’t even know what that means.

            “What should I do with it?” I asked.

            She said, “Flush it.”

            I called Heather, the oldest daughter. “I found pot in the garage,” I said. “I think your dad is smoking pot.”

            Heather laughed—sort of.

            “What should I do with it?”

            First, she offered to take it to college and give it to her reprobate dancer friends, then she said, “Flush it.”

            I shook the plastic baggy at Maren, the youngest daughter, and said, “Is this yours? And is this why you’ve been in seventeen car accidents in two years?”

            Maren said, “Nope, I’m just a really bad driver. I don’t need marijuana to make it worse.”

            I asked, “What should I do with it?”

            “Smoke it,” she said. My paranoia grew.

            What if there was a kilo of pot hidden in the Christmas decorations? What if the neighbors were hiding their stash in our garage? What if the pot had been there awhile and we have been transporting it across state lines every time we moved? Would that make us drug mules or drug traffickers?

Going into my super mom crime scene investigator persona, I started pawing through the suspect storage box. That’s when I found the plastic bag full of black cocaine.

            When Adam came home, I shook the pot and the black cocaine at him.

            “What’s this?” I accused.

            He took the plastic bags stuffed with drugs from me. He handed the bag of black cocaine back to me and said, “Well, this is dirt.” He handed the other bag back to me and said, “And these are grass seeds.”

            I shouted, “Exactly!  Grass, marijuana, ganja, wacky tobaccy—DOPE.”

            He spoke slowly and clearly and said, “No, I mean grass like, ‘I’m going to mow the grass.’ It’s an object lesson from church. My Sunday school teacher gave it to me."

            I stared at the pot and the black cocaine.

            He continued, “You know—seeds, fertile soil, faith, planting, harvest.”

            “Wow, that’s a relief. I thought our cat was smoking pot in the garage.”

            Adam laughed—sort of.

            That’s how my Monday went. Do I feel stupid? Gosh no. I feel I learned an important lesson—I know now who really loves me. Mindy really loves me, and Heather really loves me, because they told me to flush the drugs, thereby avoiding capture or death in a drug shoot-out. In contrast, Maren tried to get me hooked on drugs, and Sherwood tried to turn me into a drug pusher. Adam just tries to avoid me as much as possible.

Have a great, drug-free week,

Linda (Sell it, Flush it, Smoke it) Zern